Between the SEIU being involved in the Blagoyjevich Senate Seat Auction and the United Auto Workers getting blamed by many for driving their employers into bankruptcy, it hasn’t been a very good week for labor groups. Sure the UAW isn’t the only problem, since it takes two to tango and the Big Three management agreed to the union demands and the companies would probably be bankrupt already if not for union concessions over the last several years, but the difference in costs, efficiency, and jobs creation between unionized and non-unionized auto workers in the United States is brutal PR. And maybe the SEIU representative didn’t really want to bribe Blago with a cushy job after he leaves office, but rolling with the pigs makes you stink too.
Union members have been declining for the last 50 years. Their political involvement as an extension of the Democratic Party is good for GOTV and raising money, but I’m think public perception of hyper-political unions like SEIU (and the teamsters and others before that) has alienated many Americans from organized labor and fed the perception that all the political involvement is about advancing the interests of the union rather than the interests of the workers.
Pretty soon, Democrats are going to have to make a decision about where labor fits into the party’s goals. A large number of Democrats like myself are economically moderate, non-protectionist, pro-free (and fair!) trade, but unions obviously have a different agenda. So while I’m happy for the party to reap the dollars and volunteer time of Local 434, listening to the pandering on NAFTA or card-check silliness (since that’s a great thing to spend political capital on compared with health care reform…) are enough to drive me crazy. I think there is going to come a point when labor unions realize that most Democrats don’t support a lot of their proposed policies and most Democrats (and independents) come to belive unions are corrupt and promote economic inefficiencies. Of course, even with these irreconcilable differences, Big Labor doesn’t have anywhere else to go and Dems will still want labors money and time, even as the party continues to marginalize them in many ways.
Unions are a strange thing. My experience here in Cali has been that union negotiations tend to hinder common sense management decisions. It took me 2 weeks and asking 6 people to figure out if I could earn comp time to be used at a later date, which I can do according to California law, but not according to my union contract. It was all very frustrating. In Texas, it was more straight forward.
I was told that the unions used to be more powerful when they were a single State Workers Union, but apparently they started splitting off in the 80’s into smaller, more specific unions. Apparently the Teachers were the first to go. Now the University deals with many unions and they have little or no power to negotiate.